


The Water Cure

by Indigo2831



Category: 9-1-1 (TV)
Genre: 3.03 The Searchers, 9-1-1 3.03 The Searchers, Angst, Buck and Eddie, Buck and Eddie's Co-Dependent Bromance, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode Tag, Family, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Stop hurting Buck unless we get emotional healing afterwards
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-14
Updated: 2019-10-14
Packaged: 2020-12-15 00:50:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21025046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Indigo2831/pseuds/Indigo2831
Summary: Tag to 3x03′s “The Searchers.”  Buck recovers.  The team helps.





	The Water Cure

Water was everything: the nectar of life, the basis for survival. **  
**

And for nineteen hours, a force of cataclysmic destruction. 

Even though the ocean had receded, it still churned in Buck’s ears as he watched Eddie cradle a miraculously alive Christopher and frantically check him over for injuries. It washed everything in a blurry haze. Buck blinked, suddenly aware of the grit in his eyes, the rippling pain in his lungs, the deep ache in his leg, and a pervasive weakness clinging to him like a second skin. A tremor rippled through him like a wave pounded at an eroding beach, and he was rattled by it as it knocked him off his feet. Relief was seeing father embracing son, and feeling someone catch him, too. Relief was letting the world float away, even for a bit. 

Awareness smudged at its edges, and he was vaguely aware of Maddie arriving, all poorly reined worry and trademark fight. Things shifted and hurt even to yank whimpers out of him. It took a moment to realize that he was being carried, and not being dragged away by a phantom current, and he didn’t need to rabidly paw for a lifeline. He was surrounded by them. Something was draped over him, and he was reacquainted with the concept of warmth and heat. Then, they were moving through the red and blue lights of sirens and over smooth blacktop. 

In the midst of the disaster, when he’d waded through what felt like miles and miles of water littered with bodies and people to be saved, he forgot the rest of the world existed, undrenched and whole. 

Maddie hovered above him, cupping his cheek and holding back tears. “We’re taking you to a real hospital, Evan, okay? Can you hang on for me?” 

He wasn’t sure if he answered. His body had abandoned him. Maddie smiled regardless, stroking his hair. “You’re doing great. I know you’re tired. Just a little while longer. Trying to stay awake for me.” 

“…Chr-Christopher?” 

Maddie’s expression softened. “Eddie’s got him, Ev. He’s okay.” 

The declaration was enough for him. For the first time since he saw a monstrous wave rising so high, it seemed to scrape the sky, Buck gave himself permission to let go.

He surfaced to varying degrees of light and misery. He sank whenever he realized someone from his family, usually, Maddie, was nearby. 

This time, he woke to Hen’s reassuring voice and an unsettling cold. “Buck, hey.” 

His body felt as wrecked as California’s coastline. He could only lay there and blink and breathe. Hen left his line of sight, and he was besieged by feeling untethered. Floating free. The panic rising in him brought it all back. _The tsunami. Christopher. Eddie._ It compelled him to try to stay awake. At least long enough to find out if they were okay. 

Hen appeared again as Buck tried to muster the strength to speak.“Christopher?” he whispered.

Hen smiled and quipped about broken records. “Besides being a little pruny, he’s fine. Asking about you every hour. It’s been about a day since you were brought in, beat to hell and half-drowned.” She draped a warmed blanket over him and tucked it in around his shoulders. “I gotta tell you, Buck, I’m sick and tired of visiting your ass in the hospital,” she said, perched on the edge of his bed. 

Buck couldn’t help himself, he grinned. But then Hen’s words sank in. It had been an entire day. Sadly, he’d been near death enough times to know when he was seriously injured, and despite feeling eighteen types of horrible, and wholly exhausted, he wasn’t dying. Buck managed to sit up without passing out, and pulling off the pulse oximeter and tugging on the leads to the heart monitor. 

“Whoa, Buck. I just kidding. What are you doing?” 

“They’re gonna need the bed,” Buck muttered and turned his scattered attention to his IVs. The movement taxed him more than it should, and the pain was threatening to overcome him. 

Hen took gripped his shoulders and actually flattened him to the mattress with an embarrassing economy of movement. “Do I need to get restraints?” She questioned with an arch of an eyebrow that negated any ounce of humor. “Buck, do you know how many lives you saved?” she questioned. It was only then that Buck noticed that the amount of color in the room was incongruous with the normal monochromatic drabness of hospital rooms. There were near shrine-level amounts of flower arrangements, fruit baskets, balloons and even a few Amazon boxes piled on every open counter and free space in his room. “The hospital can spare the bed until you’re stronger than a toddler. Lie back, c’mon.” She coaxed. “You’re running a fever, and the docs want to pre-empt any infection, so you’re grounded for another half-day. Though it’ll take longer to get your strength back,” Hen said. “You scared me, Buckaroo.” 

Buck shivered and tried not to sigh in contentment as Hen reapplied the blankets. He merely offered a sheepish, “Sorry.”

“You need anything else besides my special brand of tough love?” Hen offered with a softness he wasn’t sure he deserved. “You should milk my generosity now, Bucko. You could probably get everything you want.” 

He thought about those hours combing through the debris of so many lives looking for the one person that would save his own and Eddie’s. “Can you stay?”

Hen gestured to the iPad and plump stack of paperwork and a steaming cup of coffee on the table beside the bed. “I ain’t going anywhere.” 

*911*

Maddie was stronger than people gave her credit for, and Buck felt no shame as he relied on her to power them up the stairs to his bedroom. He was essentially a walking, throbbing wound, covered in bruises and road rash with sutures in a few delicate places. Buck accepted his misery as penance for losing Christopher but was at least grateful that he could make it up to his bedroom even if his healing leg protested loudly.

“Almost there, Ev.” Chimney said as he led them up the stairs and jogged ahead to unmake the bed and pull the covers back. 

It took both Maggie and Chimney to help him sit on the bed without too much pain, and it was a testament to Buck’s broken state that he didn’t even balk at Chimney lifting his legs up onto the mattress. It was a different woman he loved tucking him in and arranging his pillows. “Comfortable?” 

“As much as I’m gonna be.” Buck groused. 

Chimney’s radio chattered. He was still on shift and had likely been granted leave by Bobby to escort Buck home. “That’s the Captain. I got to head back to the house,” he said mostly to Maddie. After a quick kiss, he turned his attention to Buck. “You, sir, stay in bed and rest up, okay? Don’t make her worry more than she already has.” 

“No promises,” Buck teased with a forced grin. 

Maddie bustled around the room from the thermostat to the bathroom. She stuttered down the stairs and returned with bottled water, an armful of magazines and Buck’s iPad. She was an innate nurturer, except when the patient was her brother. It made her emotional and angry, and she usually channeled that mother henning and ugly-cries in the bathroom. But the last two days had been horrific for her too. As a first responder, there was nothing worse than listening to people die when it was your job to help them. “Maddie, I’m going to be fine in a few days. You can go back to work.” 

She leveled him with a glare. “Get some rest while I make lunch.” 

“I’m not hungry.” He said petulantly.

“Natural disaster or not, Buck, you can’t just give up.” 

Buck raked his hands over his face. He didn’t have the fortitude to walk to the bathroom, let alone have this conversation. If he hadn’t been at the pier with Christopher, it might have been easier to let the wave sweep him out to oblivion. Life without the squad seemed less survivable than a natural disaster. But if anything, the last two days had reinforced the fact that the crew was his family regardless of his ability to fight fires. They had been consistently at his side since during his hospital stays and rehabs with no intention of letting up. Of course, a nigglingly wicked voice in his head wondered about the passage of time. Months from now when Hen had a new baby and Bobby and Athena found their groove as a married couple, would they drift away? 

But Buck lived in the moment–from fire to fire–and right now, he wasn’t alone. And there was a schedule in Google Sheets that proved he wouldn’t be for the next three days. That realization lessened the bleeding a bit and gave him something to cling to.

“Maddie, the antibiotics just make me queasy. That’s all.” 

She was startled by his confession so much that it took out her knees and she sank to the bed and dropped her head in her hands. Buck pushed himself up and pulled Maddie to him, letting her cry against his chest, where his heart beat just fine. “I’m going to try, Maddie. I promise.” 

*911*

There was a weight next to him when he woke up damp and gasping, one that he was aware of even before the darkness or the fact that he’d been dreaming again. The moonlight sluiced over the figure that was too big to be Maddie and too long to be Hen. Unfortunately, Buck’s bladder stole his attention, and he began the unpleasant task of extricating himself from the net of blankets Maddie had tangled him in and endured the trip to the bathroom to relieve himself. He splashed water on his face and brushed his teeth before limping back to the bed. He climbed in, longing for the day when he could do more than sleep and ache. 

Eddie was sacked out on the covers, mouth open, snoring lightly. He shouldn’t have been surprised, and yet he was. He hadn’t seen Eddie in the hospital. He hadn’t wanted to. 

Buck settled against the covers and waited for the leadened escape of sleep, but instead found himself staring at the undulating shadows on the ceiling and trying to convince himself they didn’t look like waves. 

“You hungry?” came the sleep-crackled inquiry. “Maddie said you’re not eating.” 

“Blame the drugs.” 

A baseball mitt of a hand pawed blindly at his face, nearly poking him in the eye. “You’re warm.” 

“And you’re a terrible nurse.” Buck griped. The brittle heat had become reassuring. It was the opposite of the dark cold water that had laid waste to everything. He hadn’t had even thought about the lives that had been lost. 

“Athena said you’ve been quiet,” Eddie said with caution. 

“Being unconscious hinders conversation a bit.” 

“Not really. You talk in your sleep. You were dreamin’. Sounded intense. Why do you think I’m in the bed?” 

“Oh.” The darkness compelled him to whisper.

Eddie shifted beside him but didn’t rise. “It’s not like you don’t have enough nightmare fuel to choose from,” he allowed. 

“Are you my shrink now, too?” 

Eddie folded an arm behind his head. “I’m just trying to piece it together. Christopher talks about it a lot. But there are a lot of holes. I mean, he should be your hype man or something because he makes you sound like a freakin’ superhero.” 

For a man who spent the last five grueling months trying to return to the LAFD, he had an aversion to that word, especially now. Not when he’d spent the better part of a day wading through ocean water past bodies bobbing like apples. As a first responder, he’d been trained to save lives and to respond decisively to disastrous situations. But the wave had obliterated everything that made sense. And Buck, an ex-firefighter, opted for flight instead of fight. Like a knee twitching when a reflex is engaged, Buck found himself in involuntary pell-mell escape from the memories and his best friend. 

Fleeing was easier when you hadn’t completely exhausted your body. His leg, that had been tender and swollen, crumbled beneath him. The resulting fall was magnificent and loud. His knee slammed against the polished wooden floor, and Buck yelped, grateful he was able to throw a hand up before his face followed suit. Pain ping-ponged through his body and he writhed with it, missing a few breaths until he was lightheaded. 

“Jesus, Buck.” 

Buck gasped in pain, peeling himself off the floor. Eddie splayed a hand on his back. “Hey, hey. Are you all right?” 

He flinched and arching his back so Eddie’s hand fell away. “I got it. I’m fine.” 

“You shouldn’t be, Buck. No one is. I’m not and I was just doing my job. I wasn’t in the thick of it. Christopher’s not either.” 

Buck looked at Eddie sharply. “What? Is he…” 

“Nightmares. I want to help him, but I need to know what happened. The whole story, and not one where you turn into Captain America.” 

Buck bit his lip as he pushed himself back to rest against the bedframe. The squad knew the bare minimum of what had happened, but Buck hadn’t had the energy or the ability to truly capture the sheer terror and violence of that day. He wasn’t sure he ever would. To realize that Christopher was dealing with the same thing scared him in an entirely different way because Buck at least had the maturity to express himself. He gaped up at Eddie and surrendered. To the fact that he wasn’t okay. That he wasn’t a firefighter. That right now he was a victim of catastrophic circumstance. That like any wound, he’d need time to heal from it all. 

“Going to the pier helped, ya know? Christopher was having fun, and I was glad I was able to do that for him. With him. I wallowed a bit, but he kicked my ass whenever I did. But the wave…man, I saw it coming and I still couldn’t…wrap my mind around it…” 

Eddie snagged the blanket from the bed, and draped it over him, and leaned back against the bed, listening. 

“The water hit like, like an explosion, and I…”

The tale came in reluctant starts and necessary stops. It came with rage and confusion, and eventually tears. Buck cried with a cathartic fervor he didn’t think he had the energy for. Eddie clapped a hand on his shoulder and reeled him in a rib-bending embrace. “You’re okay, man. It’s going to be okay,” he chanted through tears of his own. 

Everything had always cycled back to water. It was a beginning and ending, the ebb and flow of life. Water had destroyed everything, but from that wreckage would come something new, and hopefully, it would be stronger than it had been before. 

_Fin_

**Author's Note:**

> Author’s Note: I've never written “911″ fic before and this one might be incredibly cheesy, but I really wanted more character content after the tsunami arc. I also want to protect Buck forever. Let me know what you think.


End file.
